Mizzou grads Ryan Cooper and Sean Ludwig have spent nearly a decade ticking off the hundreds of restaurants on their Barbecue Bucket List.
As co-founders of The Smoke Sheet, a weekly newsletter on Substack featuring barbecue news, media, recipes and events, their pursuit of the best smoked meat means they have spent countless hours crisscrossing the four major regions of barbecue: the Carolinas, Memphis, Texas and Kansas City.
Their extensive travels through barbecue country provided an opportunity to compile an as-yet-unnamed barbecue travel guidebook by Harvard Common Press/Quarto Books due out May 2027.
“I don’t have a log of the number of miles [I’ve driven],” Cooper says during a recent research and photography pitstop in Kansas City. “But I typically drive everywhere, whereas Sean flies.” Cooper estimates that it must be “thousands and thousands of miles of driving.”
The pair hasn’t kept an exact tally of how many pounds of meat they have consumed during their travels, either. “That would be scary,” Ludwig says. “We’ve probably had thousands of pounds of barbecue over the years.”
The BBQ BFFs met by happenstance while in line for Snow’s BBQ in Lexington, Texas, a legendary pitstop so popular it requires waking up before sunrise on a Saturday to snag a sample of their world-famous brisket, pork shoulder and pork steaks before sellout.
A few months after meeting, Ludwig and Cooper grabbed lunch together at Scott’s Kitchen near Kansas City International Airport when they were both in town to visit their families and decided to start documenting their passion via The Smoke Sheet.
Cooper initially wasn’t sure there was enough BBQ meat out there to write a weekly newsletter, but he soon discovered an avid fanbase eager to ride shotgun on the duo’s road trips.
Although the pursuit of the best barbecue joints is a serious side hustle, both have kept their day jobs. Cooper lives in Omaha and works as a geographer with the National Park Service; Ludwig, who lives in New Jersey, is an editorial strategist and content operations leader.
When they began to compile their travel guidebook, they knew the easiest place to start would be Kansas City, the barbecue they have been eating since childhood.
“I think that people grow up and they try barbecue, and they think that’s what barbecue is, and that nostalgia is very powerful,” Cooper says. “Somebody who grew up in Kansas City might go to eastern North Carolina and try that and go, ‘Whoa, this isn’t barbecue!’ or ‘Whoa, this is really different!’ but I would encourage you, no matter what barbecue you grew up on, to expand your palate and just try other styles and try other places.”
Ludwig envisions the guidebook as a handy reference smoke aficionados can keep in their glove box for their next road trip.
“There’s so much that’s untapped, and I think one thing I’m really proud of is shining a light on barbecue that [isn’t] just Texas barbecue because the national conversation mostly flows through Texas,” Ludwig says. “But we want to shine it on every region because there is amazing barbecue that we had up my way in New York. You can find great barbecue in a bar. We can buy great barbecue in California. You just have to know where to go.”
